this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59392382


TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”

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[–] me_myself_and_I@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Ironic that an app monitored and controlled by the Chinese communist party allowed more freedom of speech for Americans. How the turn tables.

[–] neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Lol, that's not how it fucking works.

Key words like that don't just accidentally get filtered out with a "bug".

[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We were developing a feature to push for those posts, but a bug made it so that they were blocked.

I guess this is one of the few cases in which that could be the result of a bug.

Not a chance. Not even remotely possible if they have automated testing (which they do) and qa staff verifying features (which they also do), and smoke/regression tests after deployment (which they do).

I've worked in this industry for 30 years, and the chance that that's what happened, immediately after a takeover by people who really don't want those terms searched on, and the feature was released in that state, and stayed in that state without a hotfix or patch going out and it wasn't caught by their own testers, is practically nil.

[–] pimpampoom@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

I’m not expert and I call BS. No need to be an expert for this hahaha

[–] DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Once again, they are using this mainly to censor anti-Israel content. No one is mentionning this in the articles and comments.

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

It’s because our government is literally occupied by this genocidal state that was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Hopefully the Streisand effect takes place and people wake up to the fact that Israel was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children and bribing the rest. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I hope tik toc loses so many users it goes bankrupt

[–] 4grams@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago

Why doesn’t anyone see this for what it is. They put monitoring for certain keywords but fucked up the code and it blocked some users through incompetence. They fixed the filters, but I guarantee they are sending reports to the White House…

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 47 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like "ICE", and "epstein", then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed????? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s

[–] jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago

Like someone else said, it might legitimately have been a bug: maybe they didn't mean for the censorship to be visible to the person using those keywords, and it'd just be everyone else who can't see them. That way you'd think everything is fine but mysteriously your Epstein / ICE content just doesn't get any views

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 106 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Find. Another. Service.

TikTok is dead — just like Twitter. I don’t understand people who cling to these services. Might as well post on MySpace while you’re at it.

[–] felixwhynot@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

If you are uninstalling, you can try the federated alternative: loops

[–] VeryVito@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What? MySpace never tried to topple a democracy.

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Remember when MySpace was owned by Rupert Murdoch? Wikipedia remembers…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Most of us were teens during the 2000s. No one with fond memories of Myspace knew who Murdoch was.

Also, he only owned it for the latter half of the decade before it got sold off again.

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[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's probably either sunk-cost fallacy or outright denial

[–] rayyy@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You're already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:

  1. When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
  2. 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it's the algorithm to find and promote what works
  3. All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it's impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it's stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone
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[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 40 points 2 days ago (3 children)

This is TikTok in America as managed by Larry Ellison and the US government btw. They Iron Curtained y'all.

[–] D_C@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Balderdash! That type of stuff only happens in dictatorships.
Next you'll be telling me there's a bunch of masked Gestapo goons running around shooting innocent people and kidnapping non whites...

[–] rayyy@piefed.social 9 points 1 day ago

That type of stuff only happens in shit-hole countries - FTFY.

[–] jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

masked Gestapo goons

Honestly they're more like the SA

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[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 77 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah. Right.

"If you get caught, call it a bug." seems to happen a lot this administration.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My bet is they tweak the backend instead to derank content they don't like softly next.

[–] chaogomu@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They're already doing that. There are reports that content from the DNC isn't being served anymore, even to subscribers.

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hey, now I am not able to watch videos about my favorite fast train from Germany, the InterCityExpress, ICE. /s

[–] hakunawazo@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Always remember: If you flip the Deutsche Bahn logo, the customer is depicted.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

Translation: "We got caught"

[–] Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 day ago

Every time. Facebook said the same thing when things that upset the powers got hidden or deleted.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Maybe—and I'm going out on a limb here—just maybe, using centralized media to document State-sponsored domestic terrorism is a fucking stupid idea. Especially since the very same platform is co-owned by the State.

Y'all, we already went through this with Xitter. Sorry you fell for it again, but this won't be the last time if you continue to cling to platforms owned by the very people who want to censor you.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We're not the ones who need to hear it, though.

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[–] Chozo@fedia.io 18 points 2 days ago

Weird timing these bugs seem to have, eh?

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 10 points 2 days ago

How convenient.

[–] FukOui@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Might not be a lie. They might be silently rolling a feature to selectively censor/ show ICE fascists and accidentally censored all by mistake lol

[–] artyom@piefed.social 14 points 2 days ago

Okay good so they're going to fix it then?

[–] myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

By bugs they mean bending over backwards to please daddy.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

it was one of the last platform that allows significant criticism against ISrael without being censored, thats why.

[–] Riverside@reddthat.com 1 points 1 day ago

That's when it was under Chinese ownership, remember they had to sell the US Tiktok to a Yankee company

[–] chaogomu@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ah, but that's the thing. There are always new platforms.

The current winner seems to be a new one called Upscrolled.

The guy behind it is a Palestinian out of Jordan, with Australian citizenship?

Anyway, that's all I currently know about it, the app is being hugged to death by tens of thousands of new users over the last day or two.

[–] Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not Open Source…

It is considerably more open and build on open source technologies and they do want to become decentralized “once the open protocols mature (?)” but still, can someone educate the kids on software freedom please.

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